1. Field of the Invention
The present invention pertains to verifying reliability of an operations process for information technology (IT) system management.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, IT systems are becoming larger and more complicated. IT system operation management requires more specialized knowledge ever than before and involves the performance of necessary steps according to a proper procedure (hereinafter, operations process). At the same time, rapidly changing business environments demand that IT systems be able to accommodate change flexibly and swiftly.
As a result, man-hours for labor such as with a system change have increased and many operation errors resulting from human error have been reported. Complicated operation management, flaws in operation manuals, the skills or know-how of personnel, etc. cause the errors. To solve such problems, a reliable operations process must be performed.
A key point for reliable execution of an operations process is error prevention. When an error occurs, the cause is analyzed to create a preventive measure that is incorporated into the operations process to prevent a reoccurrence of the error. Hence, for the operations process to be reliable, preventive measures against past errors must be incorporated into the process.
However, at present, as operations processes are designed by humans, an operations process with insufficient preventive measures may be created as a result of inexperience or careless error on the part of the creator. Further, as operations processes are checked by humans, flaws may go undetected.
For these reasons, even if an operations process is concluded to have no problems at the check phase, the operations process may actually not be reliable and cause errors during execution. In light of such problems, in documents such as Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication Nos. 2004-310311, H8-190584, and 2001-155062, techniques to support operation management of a system have been disclosed.
As for a method of checking whether a preventive measure has been incorporated into an operations process, a method using additional information (tag) is known. The tag information indicates attributes of each step of the operations process. Multiple tag information items (executing person, object of step, type of step, and so on) can appended to one step.
Circumstances at the time of execution can be known from the tag information. Additionally, for past errors, causes and preventive measures have already been examined. Therefore, the circumstances can be correlated with the past errors, thereby creating mapping information that can identify relationships among: 1) process, 2) situation, 3) error, and 4) preventive measure.
Preventive measures to be incorporated into the operations process can be identified by reference to the mapping information with the aid of the tag information. Further, by checking whether all the preventive measures have been incorporated into the operations process, oversights in preventive measure incorporation can be prevented.
According to the conventional technique, although it can be confirmed whether necessary prevent measures are included in the operations process, it cannot be known whether prevent measures have been incorporated at proper positions within the operations process. Some preventive measures need to be placed at a specific point or within a specific part to be functional.
Consequently, even if a preventive measure is included in the operations process, errors can occur during operation due to mislocation of the preventive measure. In this case, since the operations process needs be redesigned, design costs increase and the design period is prolonged.
Further, in many cases, since the flow of the operations process includes branches, the operations process has multiple paths. If a step that is a cause of an error and the preventive measure are on different paths, the preventive measure is often unable to function. The conventional techniques do not take into account the branches in the operations process. Consequently, in addition to the problems above, the omission of preventive measures occurs and the reliability of the operations process is significantly reduced.